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The Year of Eco Decorating

The Guggenheim International Gala was decorated with recycled materials.Credit
Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

ONE mark of a really good party has always been an almost biblical catalog of waste and excess, lovingly expressed in gallons of Champagne, acres of fabric, plywood and red carpet, and jetloads of exotic flowers. But in a year dominated by talk of the green movement, such practices can be viewed not just as unseemly but as downright anarchic — and not in a good way.

Pity the party planners and designers who have to grapple with the new calculus — mostly for public institutions and organizations for which the benefit or awards gala is a yearly rite — and still make a shindig look as if it cost six figures. “Can a party be sustainably produced?” is a question asked recently by several of these planners and designers, whose work has often influenced ambitious party hosts at home. The answers they have come up with are both intriguing and confounding.

“I started to think about all this stuff because I’d be going to events and the invitation would be printed with the words, ‘This is a green event!’” said David Stark, the very conceptual event designer who has made his name creating parties for institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, “and there’d be burlap tablecloths and green lighting — and I don’t mean fluorescent bulbs but the color green — and somebody would stand up and say, ‘Change starts here!’ and I’d think, You’ve got to be kidding.”

If waste is endemic to a party, Mr. Stark asked himself, how could that waste be rethought?

“I wasn’t so naïve as to think we wouldn’t be using a lot of stuff,” he continued, “but I wondered how that stuff could be more thoughtful. And then the artist in me wanted to present a commentary, not just a solution.”

And so it was that Mr. Stark, who had been commissioned to put together the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s awards gala last month, directed the museum to shred its office paper for six months, producing a harvest that he augmented with 12 years of his personal tax returns and his own office’s papers. He then turned the resulting 6,000 pounds of paper strips into giant topiaries and chandeliers, floridly archaic shapes fashioned from trash. It was the language of excess — those topiaries recalled the gardens of Versailles — expressed in the material of frugality.

The endeavor was not without contradictions or mishaps, said Mr. Stark, who had to comply with the museum’s fire codes requiring that all that material be flame-proofed. “So then we had to find the organic fire retardant guy,” he continued, “and for two and a half months we were dipping 6,000 pounds of paper in fire retardant and then trying to dry it out by spreading it on the floors of our warehouse.” As the date of the event loomed closer, Mr. Stark looked out upon the soggy landscape, realized he needed help, and bought three energy-hogging commercial dryers to finish the job.

“I’m certainly not going to do it again,” he said, “but I learned a thing or two.”

Mr. Stark came to recognize, as have others in his line of work, that there aren’t yet enough resources out there to make every event fully green. For all the parties like the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation benefit, for which Mr. Stark chose saplings as centerpieces — for those guests who didn’t take them home, Mr. Stark said, “we made arrangements for them to go to a forestry” — there are those like the Costume Institute’s Chanel party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art two years ago, decorated with 7,000 gardenias and 25,000 pounds of boxwood, all of which “went into the Dumpster,” said David Monn, the event’s designer.

“There hadn’t been an infrastructure on the back end to help us,” he explained. “But this year I’ve found the guy who can chip the greenery into compost. We’re figuring it all out.”

A few weeks ago, Mr. Monn wrapped 28,000 square feet of a parking garage on the Hudson River in post-consumer cardboard for the Guggenheim International Gala; he also made tables, chairs, centerpieces and chargers out of the stuff. The décor was partly an homage to Frank Gehry, one of the evening’s honorees, who designed cardboard furniture in the 1970s and 80s, but also a conceptual nod to eco-sensitivity, like Mr. Stark’s Cooper-Hewitt event. (The tables and carpets went to Housing Works, the AIDS services organization, after the event.)

“Scale is important in what I do,” Mr. Monn said. “It’s about a total environment. I like to say that when I create an event I take into consideration everything as far as you can see and as near as you can touch. That scale alone depends on a lot of materials.” That said, he added sternly, “I don’t believe in gluttony. It’s one of the seven deadly sins and you can get punished for it. I’ve been thinking a long time about what I might be able to do to decrease the waste inherent in our business.”

Mr. Monn and Mr. Stark have done well with beige and brown — Mr. Stark’s design for the Museum of Arts & Design’s Visionaries awards party this month used twine, packing boxes and Bubble Wrap for decoration; after the event the museum, which is moving locations, took the packing materials home. But in a culture where the most iconic visual images of the green movement are rather less festive — like an image of Al Gore’s face, or a picture of drowning polar bears — making a decorative green statement on a grand scale has been a challenge. You have to invent your own symbols.

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A Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum party was also decorated with recycled materials.Credit
Philip Greenberg

“That’s how I came up with Rudolph the Recycled Reindeer,” said Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, who used empty soda cans like mosaics in his Christmas windows this month. “You can do this stuff at home,” Mr. Doonan said. “You can go gold with decaffeinated Diet Coke, and there’s lots of blue and silver in drinks like Pepsi and Red Bull. You can make wreathes out of old silver pot scrubbers. We’ve done a green version of the 12 Days of Christmas, which I will happily sing to you and which ends with ‘a Prius in a pear tree.’”

Speaking of the Prius, the Left Coast has been much quicker to embrace and flaunt green party planning. The turning point, said Jeffrey Best, whose company, Best Events, has been decorating awards ceremonies and their afterparties for 15 years, was the Academy Awards ceremony in 2003.

Global Green, an environmental group, approached Mr. Best with a challenge that year. “They said, ‘We’d like to do some arrivals with a green car, do you have any ideas?’ They approached Toyota and we connected them with celebrities. And that’s how the whole Prius thing started. You witnessed something that hadn’t been seen before.”

Last winter, Mr. Best designed furniture for the Golden Globes ceremony from “108-year-old wood harvested from lakes in Utah,” he said. “They wanted unique furniture and they didn’t want to cut down any trees. And instead of a vinyl press wall, we used that wood with the words carved into it. And we’ll use it all again this year.”

He added that he has purchased carbon offsets for a few of his events from Carbonfund.org.

“We’d like to do that for everyone,” said Mr. Best, who said he has broached the idea with General Motors, another client, but has yet to receive any answer. “It’s all part of the same life, right?”

Arianna Huffington recalled this year’s Emmy Awards, billed as the “Green Emmys” as a defining moment.

“At one point, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert came out to present an award,” she said, “and Colbert was wielding a leaf blower. Stewart scoldingly reminded Colbert that these were the ‘Green Emmys’ and Colbert replied that the blower ran on ‘Al Gore’s tears.’ It’s been a great transition: Hollywood has gone from the capital of conspicuous consumption to the cutting edge of conspicuous conservation.”

Back in New York, Mr. Doonan was less enthusiastic. “I think it was the Emmys where Ryan Seacrest announces, ‘Tonight’s event is green!’ and you see all these klieg lights burning,” he said. Mr. Doonan’s environmental efforts include ”satire that comes from a green place,” he added. “I’m determined to bring a bit of humor to the green movement. Think sustainable swag.” In his remarks at a recent fashion awards dinner, he promised to sell chiffon offsets at the door.

In terms of the great green ledger in the sky, there is no way for most of us to know whether expending the energy to produce 6,000 pounds of shredded paper topiaries is really a “better” choice than just flying in crates of carnations, or whether making tables and chairs out of recycled cardboard makes more sense than just renting them. As Mr. Stark pointed out, what you’re really dealing with are symbols.

James B. Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, agrees. “It’s all about symbols and sensation,” said Professor Twitchell, whose many books deal with how marketing shapes a society. “That’s what I find so fascinating about our Prius culture. We know things are wrong. We don’t know what we can do. We can’t know. And so we do what marketers encourage us to do to get those feelings we want to have. We buy the Prius, we recycle at the party, pretty much overlooking the fact that what we know about these objects and these actions comes from their marketing.”

Perhaps the greenest party this year wasn’t billed as such. Deitch Projects was the host of a do last February for the publication of the photographer Jason Schmidt’s book, “Artists.” The décor was supplied by Gelitin, four male Viennese conceptual artists who wore high heels and buckets on their heads but no pants, and who spent the evening building a plywood structure over the bewildered guests’ heads. Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor, sang a 16th-century melody called “Flow My Tears.” And then the Gelitin members, along with three Icelandic artists, also men, from a collective called Moms, took the buckets off their heads and urinated — with dead-eye accuracy, said Dodie Kazanjian, a Vogue editor and one of the events’ hosts — into one another’s pails.

Talk about creative reuse. Still, even such a basic production involved an environmental no-no. In the week before the event, Ms. Kazanjian recalled, “I did see a lot of bottled water being brought into the gallery.”